The FT has reported that KPMG is planning to give up its graduate recruitment programme in the UK, and is instead planning to recruit before young people go to university. It is intending to take on 75 school leavers a year and send them on a four-year accountancy degree at Durham University, for this which KPMG will pay the costs, and a salary.
Three thoughts follow: KPMG are clearly worried about the need to catch young people young so that they can train them in their way of thinking before they can be corrupted by thoughts of ethics, tax justice or duty to society.
Second, doesn't this deny 95% of the benefit of going to university, which in my experience was to have the opportunity to learn and question independently, even if I did end up with KPMG at the end of the process?
Third, shame on Durham for being so blatantly commercial that they will degrade their academic process into being a mere training scheme. I talk about regulatory capture quite often, but this is academic capture, and it probably amounts to much the same thing because in both cases the chance of objectivity disappears.
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Yes, but many of the best and the brightest from less well off families will do it to avoid the £27k fees debt. I wonder how many years of loyal service to KPMG they will have to sign up to to get the money?
What a truly horrible development.
Worse, I bet you’d struggle to find anyone in the government or the universities management (if not faculty) who could see what the problem is.
Unless things have changed since I did my ACA training, I cant see Durham and KPMG contribute to a level playing field in encouraging children from low income backgrounds into their “world”. I was lucky, Bristol Uni positively discriminated against the private sector applicants on my degree course and gave me a place even though my grades, confidence, ambitions were lower (not unusual when you are from a single parent family on social security, parental mental health issues etc…. ). I havent looked back..
This is what Engineering companies did back in the eighties (and still do for all I know). It’s called sponsorship and applies to thick & thin sandwich degree courses. As I saw it, the idea was to combine theory with practice and produce better engineers. Accountancy is a technical, rather than an ethical, subject, like engineering.
The pity is that large companies always focus their recruitment on youngsters and ignore the legion of already experienced & qualified engineers made redundant by the industry. There is an element of moulding younger minds more easily, but chiefly it’s cost. Graduates are recruited for lower wages than middle-aged engineers, though the pay difference in no way reflects the years served / experience gained. In fact, in the ageist private sector, experience counts against you.
I thought you complained about firms not investing enough in the workforce? Shouldn’t you support this, especially as poor students will benefit the most.
@Stephen Selby
Why will poorest students benefit most
Are KPMG allocating quotas?
@Mike
I remember those students
Alienated from all the rest as I recall it
And accountancy is not just a training – it is an academic discipline about what and how we measure
@Mike @Richard. My recollection is that engineering students with sponsorship were free to choose a uni/poly of their choice – they weren’t shoe-horned into the ‘Costain Thick Sandwich’ at Uni ‘X’. As someone not sponsored, I didn’t knowingly shun anyone who was – I was rude and indifferent to all on a non-discriminatory basis!
@Mike – technical though engineering may once have exclusively been, nowadays there’s a broader emphasis on the consequences of infrastructure investment decisions, no? To quote from Southampton ‘we will give you an appreciation of engineering ethics and the engineer’s role in society’. Just one example maybe, and civil engineering only (which is my interest), but there’s a rather myopic view of engineering at large so hopefully this may dispel that somewhat?